Monster loves Thai food.

Shot spur of the moment without a script at my friend’s restaurant in Taiwan, just for delicious fun.

Sadly, my pair of black shoes, shoes I’ve had for around 10 years now through high school orchestra, college, work in Indiana, and now this dance, have sacrificed themselves for the cause. By the end of shooting, the foam in the soles had disintegrated and fell away in both shoes to join the rubble of the storm drain.

And if you ever want to trip someone out, make a photo mask of their face and wear it when you meet them. Even better when they’re looking away, and then you say “Hey, look at this” and there they are staring at their own face. It’s a strange, confusing mind melting moment.. Thankfully the earth was not destroyed in the process!

Bird
Dye Painted Fabric

Le Sacre Coeur
mixed media

Dew
oil

Polar Bears Have Black Skin
etching

Penguin Cloud
woodblock print

Yeti
4×5 film

India Sketches
pencil, charcoal, ink

Mahabodhi
ink

Ice Bridge
photo collage

P Step Step Step Step Ste
etching

H a p nes
etching

Boracay
mixed media

Boracay Bat
mixed media

Boracay Giant Sloth
mixed media

Cebu Panda
mixed media

Cebu Monkey
mixed media

Sterotypical Mad Scientist
dye painted fabric

Smiley
dye painted fabric

Human
dye painted fabric

Panda | dye painted fabric

Bear
monotype

Sheepish
monotype

Fish
monotype

Chicago
mixed media

Instinct
lithograph

I have all of these collected in a book. However, you’d have to find me in person or send me a message if you want one. Fortunately for you, though, all the images are online! You can also check them out on Flickr.

The hotel room, designed to make you feel at home, or rather, like you aren’t somewhere many many miles away. Sometimes I’d rather not stay in a hotel room. I’d rather get out and see the streets and the people and be woken up by that chicken or garbage truck or loud music that comes at around six in the morning.

Other times I’d rather hole myself up in that well equipped space, and just let my mind decompress. It’s really about what the head needs: more input, or less.

Foreign places are some of the most inspiring, intriguing, interesting, and all those other i_____ing words out there. A world full of new distractions that works on all of the senses. Walking down the street to get a bite to eat can be an adventure.

Yet sometimes the head can get too full and it just needs to take, well, a mental dump. Free from distractions and newness, where the temperature is always the same and so too, the artwork on the wall is always horrible.

All of this multiplies when traveling with someone, and the threshold becomes higher to venture out into the true unknown if you both aren’t up for anything.

For a long while I didn’t want to stay in any hotel because, well, how drab. But sometimes that’s what the head needs, even more than the body (although the whole regulated temperature and nice big bed provided their own reliefs which put the mind at ease in their own way).

This hotel was provided by a host, undoubtedly one of the best hotels in the city (signaled with one of the highest and most neon-illuminated signs in the city). So thank you to that host; the Chinese people I’ve met are some of the most hospitable I’ve ever met.

Although I must add, one difference about Chinese hotels? Most have the added “feature” of a KTV on one of the floors. Then again, I try to stay as far away as possible from all the forms of KTV, so maybe that’s a strike against hotels.

Using a payphone, how traditional.

Our hosts thought it amusing to dress us up in the traditional clothing found now at tourist stops, like the southern great wall in Hunan Province.

Parts of China are some of the most remote, at least land farthest away from the sea. But with all of the transportation options now available, it doesn’t seem so far away as it once was. In a way, the distance has gotten smaller.

Even in the height of travel (Spring Festival, when almost everyone travels home, possibly one of the biggest migrations of people on the earth) it’s still possible. Well, you might end up standing for a whole day on a train, and if heavy snow comes and people are stuck well then it was really bad, but even with that it still all works pretty well.

I had to take nearly every form of transportation. Even if it meant drawing a picture of a bus and pointing to the words of the next town I wanted to get to.

Long Distance Bus.

On the train. Each compartment like this has six bed surfaces on each side but during the day or when not sleeping everyone sits at the lowest level.

Local bus in Changsha.

Taxi in Chenzhou.

Local bus in Chenzhou. Which gets pretty crowded.

When I was in the heart of China did I realize I had no clue what the country was like. Throw away the conception of communism and replace it with one of some befuddled but very effective capitalism.

Now throw away the conception of temples and replace it with lots and lots of skyscrapers and cranes. Everywhere I looked, even in the middle of the countryside, some new tall building was being erected with a crane on top.

Even the cities I’d never heard of are big cities. Big like Chicago big. And there are a whole ton of those unheard of cities. Like Changsha (below).

The cities I had heard of, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, go on forever. Shanghai is perhaps one of the biggest cities in the world. As I was taking the train out of Shanghai all I saw for miles outside of the city were developments and factories, new bigger buildings and more cranes. Driving down a highway in Beijing was endless skyscraper after skyscraper, like downtown stretched for the whole city.

I had to take on a new perspective. The scale of roads and intersections were multiples bigger than what I’m used to. Many intersections in the big cities seem vast, even in the cities like Changsha. Something like six lanes and room for bikers or electric bikes too. Even the sidewalks look big.

Crossing the street becomes an ordeal, especially if you don’t wait for the walk sign. And few do.

Some intersections could pretty much fit a football field inside of them. When six or so streets converge at one point, that’s when there’s a whole system of underground tunnels to navigate through, and I ended up on the wrong street on more than one occasion.

The buildings are tall. The highways are long. The people are many. This beast is big.

I found a giant in the Philippines, and her name is Tren.

The Karst peaks along the Li river made me realize that the misty mountains depicted in Chinese ink paintings actually look as magical in real life. Located in Yangshuo, Guangxi Province, China. Shot with a Sony HX1.

Music by the Gorillaz “Hong Kong”